Exhibiting Identities: The Curatorial Work of Becoming an Inclusive Teacher

• In Event: An International Symposium on the Practice of Inclusive Education: From Teachers to Systems

Abstract

Objectives or purposes
The purpose of this study was to understand how teachers appropriated social discourses present in an urban professional learning school for inclusive education.
Theoretical framework
This study drew from socio-cultural theory to understand key concepts in regards to teacher learning. Social discourses in this study was defined as ways of combining various meditational tools to enact a socially recognizable situated identity (Gee, 2001). The term appropriation was used as a proxy for learning and refers to the process through which teachers make meditational tools (i.e., social discourses and their combined meditational tools) their own as they participate in goal oriented activities (Newman, Jenkins, & Cole, 1989).
Methods
This study took place in two urban schools in a southwestern state in the US that had a partnership with a university to develop inclusive practices through a professional learning school model. The participants of the study included five teacher residents who participated in a masters’ program embedded in this partnership. The unit of analysis in this study was the activity system (Engeström, 1987) of teacher residents’ lessons in the classroom. Data collection procedures included videos of teacher residents’ practice, video stimulated interviews with teacher residents, entry and exit interviews with teacher residents, and artifacts and documents from the schools and classrooms. To analyze these data I used Erickson’s and Schultz’s (1997) guidance for video analysis and analytical tools from grounded theory (Strauss & Corbin, 1990).
Results
To describe how teachers appropriated the social discourses present in an urban professional learning school, I introduce the concept of curating that I describe as involving two processes: privileging and appropriating. Just as curators select specific works of art (from among many) to comprise an exhibit, teacher residents privilege (Wertsch, 1991) certain meditational tools over others such as objects and the rules of activities which are some but not all of the components of activity systems. Just as curators make meaning of and interpret artworks, placing them in company of other artworks and creating an exhibit, meditational tools that teachers used together mediated each other’s appropriation and implementation, providing teacher residents with heuristic resources to enact certain situated identities. This became a two way process. Teacher residents appropriated the social discourses and their meditational tools. In the process of appropriation they reconstructed these toolkits and the conceptual tools themselves so that they could signal a situated identity that addressed the demands of working in a professional learning school in which two communities overlapped (i.e., the school and the university program).
Significance of the study or work
This study contributes to the engineering of professional learning programs for inclusive education by providing an understanding of how teachers engage with and learn in these programs. In addition, this study contributes to a theory of teacher identity for inclusive education by providing an understanding of how teacher learning requires a sort of curatorial work in which certain mediational tools are privileged and appropriated over others according to institutional contexts.

Author

• Federico R. Waitoller, University of Illinois at Chicago